The Fallen Tree

Alexander Cozens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A blasted tree seems to be sitting atop a hill and is set off against a cloudy sky in this imaginary landscape image. To create this work, Cozens applied washes of dark gray and brown ink to a printed impression of plate 1 from his drawing manual "A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape" (1786). In this publication, he presented a technique of making abstract blots by smudging ink quickly onto a sheet of paper with a thick brush. The purpose of this technique was to map out a basic compositional structure of a landscape image whilst leaving out the finer details, which were to be worked out at a later stage. By focusing on the overall composition, the technique was intended to free up the artist’s imagination in creating imaginary views. In this rare touched-up plate, the delicately hatched sky contrasts with the roughly printed black ink of the foreground and transforms the print’s abstract marks into a more easily recognizable landscape image.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art